In 1865, Gregor Mendel published the paper that established him as the father of genetics. However, it went largely unnoticed until it was rediscovered decades later and became widely recognized as one of the great discoveries in the history of science.
Why do some ideas quickly spread far and wide while others go nowhere at all?
As markets become more competitive marketers’ jobs become more complex. New categories are created while old ones add more segments. Novel marketing channels compete with traditional media outlets. Marketing has never been harder or more abstruse
There are those, however, that offer a false solution to all of the drudgery. They have a simple formula that explains everything. I call them “Cargo Cult Marketers“ and they are people to avoid.
Today we all use the web, but Tim Berners-Lee drives it. It’s his vision, uses his protocols and he presides over it at the World Wide Web Consortium. What was a childhood obsession with connections has become a movement that has transformed the planet.
Surely, Berners-Lee ranks with Gutenberg, Marconi and Alexander Graham Bell as one of the most influential people in the history of communication. However, his predecessors stopped at one major innovation. Berners-Lee is going for an encore.
Numbers drive Media and Marketing today. People don’t like it, but the “numbers” people usually control budgets, so numbers are endured as a necessary evil.
Professionals work through their excel sheets, make some graphs (usually too many) and try their best to back up their ideas with “hard data.” Then, they hope, they can get back to doing the creative thinking that was the reason for choosing their profession in the first place.
In 1998, McKinsey & Co declared the “War for Talent.” They didn’t do so lightly. Their study spanned an entire year, involved scores of companies, thousands of people and had a specific conclusion: In the “new economy” the key to success is to attract and retain the best talent. Their findings were logical, widely accepted and most likely wrong.
